


Running To, Not Running From

by Idontlovejessica



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alive Noah Czerny, Alternate Universe, Bluesey - Freeform, Doctor Who AU, Doctor!Gansey, F/M, Gen, Henry and Noah mostly just have fun in the background in this chapter, M/M, Minor Pynch Undercurrents, Multi, Noah Czerny is a Little Shit, Pynch undercurrents, Ronan Compliant Language
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:07:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25439698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Idontlovejessica/pseuds/Idontlovejessica
Summary: Blue points out a pocket watch Gansey seems not to have noticed before and he opens it, and then runs away for two weeks. When he comes back, he's a little different and ready to try to explain some things to his friends.
Relationships: Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent
Kudos: 1





	Running To, Not Running From

What’s that old watch anyways?” Blue had asked innocently enough. 

They were lying side by side on Gansey’s sparse bed at Monmouth Manufacturing. Blue’s hands were linked loosely in his. Her eyes were on the tarnished gold watch chain running from Gansey’s pocket to the hem of his shorts. He let out a, “Hmm?” and pulled it tight with a finger. 

“It’s just my watch. It doesn’t even work anymore.” He said, feeling almost confused by the question.

“But you never check it. I’ve never even seen you open it.” 

“Have you been watching me that closely, Jane?” Gansey asked, dangerously close to Blue’s ear. The words caught both of them off guard. Gansey felt how close Blue’s skin was to his mouth, and the tiny hairs on Blue’s ear stood up in response to his warm breath. They both caught their breath. 

“It’s nothing. It’s just a watch.” 

“Can I see it?” Blue hooked her index finger alongside the one Gansey still had absentmindedly around the chain of the watch. She pulled it out and Gansey took it with his free hand and clicked it open.

He looked at it for a long time.

Eventually, Blue called out to him, “Gansey? Are you okay?” And he started, like he hadn’t known she was there. For a moment an expression of fear passed across his face and he scrambled away from her, “I… Excuse me, miss.” He sputtered and disappeared from the room. 

*** 

Almost two weeks passed. Blue, Ronan, Adam, Noah, and Henry searched the countryside frantically. The Pig remained steadfastly parked outside of Monmouth. He wouldn’t have gone far without it, right? The ladies of 300 Fox Way could offer no advice, it was like Gansey had vanished from their considerable field of vision. 

Ten days after Gansey disappeared, Adam was exiting 300 Fox Way from another fruitless divining session when Persephone held his arm surprisingly tight right as he took the first step off the porch. “Look out after him. He’s not going to be himself for a while. It’s all starting anew.” she said with the large, almost entirely black eyes that Adam knew meant a vision was being shared with her. 

“I don’t know what you mean, Persephone..” but the psychic had floated back into the house while Adam was puzzling her statement. 

***   
Exactly fourteen days passed before Gansey appeared again. The gang was assembled at Monmouth Manufacturing early on a Saturday to play their latest attempt at finding their friend. It was the only day the various schedules of Aglionby, Boyd’s, Nino’s, and whatever Ronan considered his responsibilities lined up for a few free hours. They were gathered around the pool table/coffee table when the door to Monmouth opened below them with the characteristic squeal. All of them stood up. Blue had made it to the stairs when Gansey appeared, looking as clean and pristine as a Land’s End magazine ad. 

“Where the fuck have you been, asshole?” Ronan spat out, exactly at the same time as Blue jumped and circled her arms around him. Gansey held Blue tightly, but with restraint, as if he was keeping her from falling but not as excited to see her as she was to see him. 

“I’ve… I’ve been rediscovering myself. I have a lot to tell you all.” Gansey said with slightly more trepidation than he usually would have. The easy confidence was gone. Gansey had always appeared halfway between old and young, but now they could see decades and decades of strain on the young frame of their friend. Ronan sat down. Blue let go of Gansey and returned to her seat. Adam grabbed a stool from the kitchen/laundry/bathroom for Gansey to sit on.

“First, I’m sorry for leaving like that. I didn’t mean to scare you. I know you’ve been looking for me and I’d like to apologize for the inconvenience, especially to you, Adam. I know you must have sacrificed more than the rest to devote your time to me.” So at least the easy, Virginian, manners hadn’t left Gansey in his fortnight disappearance. Adam blushed at being called out, but deep down appreciated that Gansey knew what it took for him to ignore studying, working, and clawing out of this place. 

“I think I can repay you. All of you. Perhaps you, Adam, the most. With what I’m going to explain to you. I’ve asked you all to believe in some incredible things over the years I’ve known you. Welsh kings transported across oceans in straight lines. Magical forests. Centuries old sleepers granting favors to those who wake them. And it’s all true. But it’s nothing like what I told you.” here Gansey paused to collect his breath. The collected group leaned in, they were used to speeches from Gansey, but this felt like a confession, not a lecture. 

“I am not who I thought I was. I am not who you thought I was. Blue showed me. I am, and this will be hard to believe, I am not from this world. I thought that I was. But I have learned recently that there was much I was repressing. A whole lifetime, a whole universe I had hidden away in a watch.” 

“The pocket watch.” Ronan and Adam said at the same time. They looked at each other and then quickly away. “I always figured it was from Dick 2.” Ronan added sheepishly. 

“No, it was from me. But maybe it was disguised for you to assume you knew what it was.” 

“What do you mean, a different universe?” Blue finally chimed in. 

“I am...I am not from this planet. I am from a different planet entirely. A planet called Gallifrey.”

Henry laughed joyously at this, “Oh Ganseyboy I thought something was seriously wrong with you! I thought you were going to tell us you were the illicit lovechild of your mother and a Kennedy. But really, where have you been these past two weeks?”

“I’m not lying, Henry. I am trying to tell you…” Gansey closed his eyes. “Maybe it will be better if I just show you.” He stood up and almost unconsciously the group stood up with him. They followed him downstairs to the first floor of Monmouth Manufacturing which usually stood empty but now contained a phonebooth sized blue wooden box. “Police Telephone Box” was stamped across the front of it and little handles led inside. Gansey, with a deep sigh, pushed the door open and walked in, gesturing to his friends to follow. Blue walked in without thought, followed by Ronan, then Adam, then Henry, then Noah. Each prepared themselves for a squeeze but were greeted instead with wide open space in front of them.

“You disappeared for two weeks to remodel the first fucking floor?” Ronan asked as he stared around the space in front of him.

It was expansive, larger than the first floor of Monmouth, and curved like a sphere or a stadium around them. Directly in front of the door a metal walkway led upwards to a level suspended at the radius of the sphere. The rest of the sphere was crafted out of dark wood and entirely filled with books. Like a library built into a globe. Spindly little bronze ladders curved in parabolas against the interior surface of the ball. In the center of the sphere, Gansey stood at what looked like a cross between a pipe organ and a giant typewriter. Flutes, iron stamps, buttons, keys, levers, pulleys, stoppers, pedals, pumps, and other strange accouterments splayed out in a circle around a central pillar of warbled, bubbled, glass. Light pulsed deep within the pillar at either extreme. 

Blue was the first to take ginger steps up the gangway to the central layer where she was greeted with the sight of Gansey typing furiously into an utterly out of place modern keyboard and digital screen encased in what looked like a television from, at best, 1952. After a sequence at the keys, Gansey turned to look at her. “Are you afraid, Jane?”

“I’m confused, Gansey. I don’t know if I’m afraid.” 

“Quite right. I… Yes keep calling me that for now.”

“Calling you what? .. Gansey? What else are you called?”

“I remembered what they used to call me before I forgot myself. But I’m not sure I am that person anymore.” Gansey explained, without much clarification. 

“So what did they call you before?” Adam came to them on the central platform and asked with his usual practicality. 

“I was called… I’m called the Doctor. But Gansey is fine for now.”

“Stupid name. Gansey was pretentious enough without giving yourself a goddamned title. What, did you earn your PhD. in the two weeks you were gone? I didn’t realize they gave out doctorates in believing in Welsh ghost stories.” Ronan shot across the bow, like he always did. Blue, Henry, and Adam looked reproachful. Ronan sneered back at them, “Like any of you believed we’d find fucking Glendower.”

“I actually have degrees in a variety of subjects, I think I got my first certification at the University al-Qarawiyyin in their inaugural class back in 859. Then it was a couple years at Bologna, then the Sorbonne, then I went back and did the first courses at Oxford and Harvard. Oh! And I have an honorary doctorate from Yale, but that’s only because John Calhoun thought I was a good lad at the bar.” 

The group looked at Gansey. Gansey looked back, surprised at himself, apparently. “I… I didn’t know I knew that. But I did. I did those things. This,” He gestured to their room they were in, “This is a spaceship! This is my spaceship. It’s called the TARDIS. I think. I’m sorry. I’m processing a lot of information all at once.” 

“I think we all are, Gansey.” Adam said. 

Henry and Noah seemed fine. They weren’t listening to the conversation on the deck, but were instead exploring the shelves and ladders. 

“Guys! Look! I’m upside down but nothing’s falling out of my pockets!” Noah shouted from a precarious angle above them.

Ronan and Gansey replied at the same time, Ronan with “It’s cause you’re dead, idiot!” and Gansey with “Yes, the ladders are gravity locked. Whatever orientation you are at down adjusts with it so you stay consistent.” 

Adam was investigating the control panel in the center. His long fingers ghosted over the various inputs on the six-sided construct. Afraid to touch anything. “You said this was a spaceship?” 

“Yes, well, not just a spaceship. It’s also a time machine!” Gansey was looking more like himself the longer they spent inside the ship, the longer his friends stayed in the ship still with him, not running away from him yet. “I can show you, if you like.”

“Sure, why not.” Ronan shrugged. 

“You’re all taking this remarkably well.”

“Wouldn’t be the strangest thing we’ve seen together, Gansey. Ronan’s already time traveled back in Cabeswater, with the Latin on the stone.” Adam reminded them all. Ronan lifted an eyebrow and shot a finger gun at Adam. Gansey smiled and set off. He spun around the console with a frantic but practiced ease, flipping switches, typing, playing a quick melody on the organ portion of the panel, and ended by a control that looked remarkably like the gear shifter in the Pig. “Are you ready?” 

They nodded.

Gansey grinned his winning-est smile, “Then hold on tight.” And he pulled the control all the way down. The ship jolted under them. Ronan stumbled back as he had stubbornly refused to hang onto anything. Blue was holding onto the underside of the console, and Adam had crouched to protect himself with one arm wrapped securely around one of the beams that held up the bronze railing around the console platform.

High above them Noah and Henry clung to their ladders and laughed merrily as the wheeled ladders swung around the sphere as they moved. A terrible noise thrummed through the console and lights pulsed in the glass pillar at its center. Blue found herself oddly thrilled by the sound, a groaning, eager wheezing that sent a similar shiver down her spine. All at once, though it, stopped as Gansey flipped the gear shift back into place and a gong-like noise echoed through the chamber. Gansey strode comfortably to the door and opened them both wide. 

“Well, aren’t you going to come see?” The group followed him, Noah and Henry still lagging behind after finally climbing down to ground level. Gansey stood backlit by starlight as they approached the doors. Blue looked out at the expanse above them. “I’ve taken us into a comfortable near-earth orbit, just to show you I was telling the truth.”

“We didn’t doubt you Gansey.” Adam murmured, but he was too enthralled with the sky in front of them. Far below the globe stretched out immeasurably far, with shifting clouds and peeks of green and deep blue. They all stood and just looked for several minutes at the sights. In awe. Even Gansey, one part of his brain knowing he had seen this exact sight, felt this exact orbital tug, dozens of times, over a dozen lifetimes, with dozens of other people marveling as his friends marveled now, but a younger part of him was awestruck right along with them. His brain was knitting his memories back together slowly starting with his fingers and muscle memory with the TARDIS and giving him words to say just as he started speaking. The younger part of him was examining these changes with studied interest and trying to note how these new experiences matched along with his memories, while this new old portion looked over his Gansey memories with interest, but not much weight. All of them were snapped out of their reverie with a gruff voice,

“What’d you think would happen if I stepped out of here?” Ronan asked, pushing Blue out of the front spot and standing at the edge of the doors. 

“Don’t be stupid, Ronan.” Adam chastised. 

“I’ve extended the airfield, so you’d be alright for a while, but if you fell past the TARDIS’ range you’d drop down to the surface. You’d be dead before you could feel your body being burned by the friction of re-entry though, so there’s that. You humans can only survive the vacuum of space for about fifteen seconds before you pass out from lack of oxygen, and only a few minutes before your blood and fluids begin to boil.”

“Fuckin’ cool.” Ronan scuffed his foot out of the door like he was kicking a stone and stuck his hands in his pockets. It was cool, but he was warned off from trying anything too deadly for now. 

“‘You humans’, you say that like you’re not one too.” Adam had, of course, noted the new information presented in Gansey’s statement. 

“I’m not. Or… I’m not now. I remember what I actually am now. I think part of it was held in the watch too, my essence. I am a Time Lord. From Gallifrey, like I said.”

They turned to look at him now with true suspicion for the first time. This is what Gansey had been dreading. Like Adam had said earlier, the group had seen enough strange things in rural Virginia that what he was showing them now was almost mundane. Cabeswater manipulated time, Cabeswater had areas that changed and shifted in size, so a bigger-on-the-inside time machine was not out of the realm of experience. But Gansey being different, Gansey being not human. Gansey not being Gansey in essence, was something none of them, including Gansey, were prepared for. 

“I have two hearts. I’m an alien. I hid myself in that pocket watch and pretended to be a human the whole time you’ve known me. I didn’t grow up here, I haven’t even been Gansey long. I think I must have hid myself away right before I moved here to Aglionby and met Ronan.”

“But I’ve met your parents, Gansey. I’ve been to your house.” Adam countered.

“Have you? Or do you just think you did because of a memory? Memory can be adjusted, we know that from when Noah first disappeared. The technology of that watch can implant memories deep into your consciousness, like it did with mine. And all of you have been in contact with me for long that your consciousnesses must have begun to start fusing with mine in its telepathic matrices.” Gansey explained this like it was commonplace and easy to understand. Then he caught himself briefly and looked surprised. Crossing to him, Blue took Gansey by the elbow and said softly, “But are you still… are you still Gansey?”

Gansey shrugged. “I don’t know. I remember being Gansey. I remember dying on the leyline. I remember studying with Adam for geometry. I remember corralling Ronan into going back to school. I remember Whelk, and Greenmantle, and Piper, and the Demon. I remember going on a roadtrip with you and Henry. I remember Noah. But I also remember a lot more. I also remember being this whole other person who has lived so, so long. I’ve seen so many things as this Doctor person. I think I might be… both? I want to be Gansey for all of you,” He gestured out to the group looking at them now, but his eyes returned to Blue’s quickly, “I want to be Gansey for you, Jane. But I think I’m getting to know myself again, and you might have to too.”

This explanation seemed to satisfy Ronan at least, who passed Gansey with just a slap on the back and said, “Gansey’s an alien. That makes more sense than most of the shit we deal with. Explains his shit taste and stupid shorts at least. Only someone who’s not from earth would wear what you do asshole.” He walked up to the console and started jabbing things randomly. The TARDIS gave a groan and lights started flashing wildly. Ronan grinned his shark grin and Gansey ran up the gangway to try to correct his mistakes. 

“Please don’t. She’s sensitive. Besides, we have somewhere to go.” 

The gang followed them up back to the console level and spread out in a circle unconsciously. Gansey fiddled more delicately with the controls and as he walked back to the gear shifter Adam spoke up.

“You said we had somewhere to go?”

“Yes of course. Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Gansey turned to him with a driving expression. All the light of discovery and confidence that they had each, in their own way, fallen in love with in the young Gansey, was in full dazzling display. 

“We’re going to go meet Glendower.”

**Author's Note:**

> I said I would do it. Here it is. My Doctor!Gansey AU. Chapter 1. We will see if any more come of it. I have plans. Six characters are a lot to keep track of tbh.


End file.
